Masters of disaster

A few years back, Rhino Records put out an umpteen-volume set of ’70s music with this sales pitch: “The ’70s are back, and there’s still nothing you can do about it!” I wanted to do something about it after having to endure “Disco Duck” and David Soul’s “Don’t Give Up on Us” once again, but relented.

The decade comes roaring back again this week in the multiplexes and video stores with that uniquely ’70s creation — the disaster movie. The best thing that can be said about the genre, which began with “Airport” in 1970, is that it inspired “Airplane!,” one of the all-time great spoofs (which unfortunately, started its own genre — the parody movie).

Proof that Hollywood will remake anything, “Poseidon,” the update of the 1972 hit “The Poseidon Adventure,” hits theaters Friday. Meanwhile, a new version of the original, which has become a cult favorite, comes out today in a double-disc special edition DVD.

But wait; there’s more. Also available today is “Poseidon’s” successor, “The Towering Inferno” (1974), which upped the starpower (Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and, yes, even O.J. Simpson). And we also get “Earthquake,” (1974), whose main claim to fame was its seat-shaking “Sensurround” sound.

Like a bad ’70s hit, disaster movies had their guilty-pleasure moments — the original cruise-ship flipover (“Airplane!” star Leslie Nielsen was the captain, which has a nice symmetry) and Shelley Winters’ underwater exploits in the original “Poseidon”; the way “Inferno” milked the trauma aboard the external elevator for everything it was worth.

But you knew the genre was spent when we got around to “When Time Ran Out” (1980) and a volcano with a moral compass and a keen sense of the disaster-flick pecking order — naughty people and extras became extra crispy, but not Newman (again!) or co-star Jacqueline Bisset. The one misstep was the avenging tongue of lava that took out (among lots of others) a pre-“Hill Street Blues” Veronica Hamel, who didn’t do anything to deserve her fiery fate.

After that one, which Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide called “When Ideas Ran Out,” “Airplane!” was the palate-cleanser we badly needed. What will serve as this year’s morning after?